In this post, I would like to highlight the other sessions in which I found interesting “nuggets”, to use a term that my friend and colleague, Matt Takane often uses.

Opening Keynote

Jason Tice opened the event with a keynote about games for high performing teams. The games are built on the learning from Patrick Lencioni’s book The Advantage. In a nutshell, trust is the foundation of high performing teams. The ten ways collaboration builds trust are:

Active listening

Ask questions

Leave breadcrumbs / Enable transparency

Provide humble feedback

Mentor (and learn, yes, mentoring is a social learning experience)

Be whole and authentic

Use metaphors and tell stories

Periodic reflections (What’s going well and what could be improved)

Visual framing

Share appreciation

Jason had us played at each table.

The first player rolls two regular 6-sided dices and adds the total rolled to determine the storytelling topic:

2. A time you have made a mistake or failed
3. A time that you have received recognition
4. A time that you have helped a team member/coworker
5. A time when your manager or a coworker made you angry
6. A time that you had a great day at work
7. A time when you let someone down
8. A time when you were singled out or excluded
9. Something outside of work that brings you joy
10. A time when you were inspired
11. A time when you contributed to team success
12. A time when you recognized or appreciated someone else

The player then rolls the story cubes to establish common visual metaphors upon which stories for the topic will be based.

Each participant at the table tells a short story based on the cubes that were rolled. Everyone listen (recording the story by taking note is an option).

When the story is complete, the participants respond by providing ONLY appreciations.

Conclude with a round table in which participant share how they felt during the exercise and what they learned about themselves.

The last nugget. When you receive an appreciation, take a picture, if you use a service like google photo, the photo will show up in your feed in one year!

Building Network and Bridges

The first one was the classic low-tech social network with a speed dating twist to run quickly the introduction and create the connection. For more details on how to run the activity, consider this post by Dave Gray.

The second one was about building bridges.

The goal is for two teams to each create half of a complete bridge. The acceptance criteria are:

a matchbox car should be able to drive over the bridge

the length of the bridge should accommodate eight matchbox cars

the width of the bridge should accommodate the width of 4 matchbox cars

you should be able to drive a matchbox car underneath the bridge

You have 2 minutes to plan.

You have then 8 minutes to build the bridge.

You are not allowed to look at what the other team is doing.

You are not allowed to communicate with them.

After the build phase, each team brings his half of the bridge on the integration table for a review.

You then have 2 minutes for a retrospective with the other team.

You can propose another iteration with the adaptation proposed during the retrospective.

Place the items on a kanban board, used by the multiple teams to coordinate their delivery on the integration table

Improved our way of working during a short retrospective

Enjoyed the simple introduction of the test framework

Appreciated the loud encouragement of our Product Owner

A lot of fun, and a lot of learnings!

Pandemic

Chris Diller, from the Target Dojo, proposed to play the cooperative board game Pandemic. What do you think playing a cooperative board game could teach us? They use the game as a starter in retrospective asking questions about similarities and differences with the work of a real team. We then discussed the roles in the game, and in real life, which was a rich discussion. After that, we discussed our behaviors, were we playing like an agile team during the game? Were we more or less agile than at work? Were we focused on an MVP (minimal viable product) or were we trying to do everything, and finally achieve nothing? (the latter, unfortunately…)

The debriefing phase was simple and powerful. Very well done!

Tips and tricks for meetings

Scott Showalter proposed a session to share tips and tricks for effective meetings.

Some are designed for when people start trickling down the room:

An easel pad titled “I am optimistic that…” with an invitation to complete with what you have in mind

Another easel pad titled “The meeting will be successful if…” with an invitation to complete with what you have in mind

And a last one asking for “co-facilitation volunteers” like note-takers, time-keeper

Some are designed for the meeting itself:

The collaborative note taking: using post-it notes, one note per things you want to capture, draw or write in caps, and place the notes on a dedicated easel pad

The back of the room agenda: large post-it notes have the topics we want to cover sequenced in order

The pie-chart agenda: draw a circle on a piece of paper, and then cut in slices representing the time we should invest for each topic

The classic talking stick was here a speaking object that the participants put on their heads 🙂

Scott replaces the classic “hand signal” in which the facilitator raises his hand, and all the people do the same and stop speaking as soon as they see people doing that, with a powerful whisper. He was just saying quietly: “if you can hear me clap once”, “if you can hear me clap twice”… those bring the silence in the room very effectively!

And lastly, some to close the meeting:

Success Story: The success stories are your action items, one per post-it note that you paste on an easel pad

Undo button: One post-it note is your undo button. In the rounded-square that you draw on the note, write something you want to undo.

Another great session!

The power of conflicts

Shahin Sheidae proposed a session to harness the power of conflict to improve our organization.

He started with a simple question: “pick a color that represents conflict from the color cards on the table”.

Four of us picked red, one picked black, and one orange.

We then explained what the color represented for us: Anger, fear, absence of hope, and… creativity for the person who picked orange!

An interesting difference of perspectives at our table.

From another table, we heard a person picked green, and then explain that it represents an opportunity.

The exercise is simple enough to be introduced quickly to any team. A great opportunity to have a conversation about what represents conflict for the team, and what to do the next time we will have, or maybe we should have one.

Shahin then introduced Thomas Kliman model and invited us to identify what was our default mode:

Avoiding

Accommodating

Compromising

Competing

Collaborating

We then played with a partner with fake scenarios trying to use the different mode.

In the end, we studied one real story brought by one of the people of a group of three.

Another excellent session!

Making it pop

Jenny Tarwater closed the last day before the open space with a session highlighting the importance of a structured debrief.

She introduced Thiagi Six Phases of Debriefing.

As Thiagi said: “People don’t learn from experience; they learn from reflecting on their experience.”

The six phases are meant to balance the structure and the need for the free flow of the debriefing.

Phase 1: How Do You Feel?

Phase 2: What Happened?

Phase 3: What Did You Learn?

Phase 4: How Does This Relate To The Real World?

Phase 5: What If?

Phase 6: What Next?

And, of course, we had the opportunity to test the debriefing after short games at each table:

Clock: Raise your arm and point at an imaginary clock fixed on the ceiling, point at 12, 3, 6, 9.

In what direction your finger is moving?

Clockwise

Lower the finger, until it is lower than your head, in what direction your finger is moving

Counterclockwise

Compute: Sum of 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10.

How did you compute? Left to right, right to left, by 10s, by 11s, others…

We debriefed using prompts

I felt …

I learned …

I can use …

I plan to …

Who knows what are the choices on that menu: Soup or Salad and Bread

A great session!

Terraforming Mars

Scott Showalter and David Bujard proposed an open space session using the board game Terraforming Mars.

The idea of the session was to study the gameplay of the existing game, to then, adapt it for an enterprise transformation.

What would be the metrics that will replace the score track, the temperature, the number of oceans, and the atmosphere?

Maybe: budget, position in analyst quadrant, team satisfaction, customer satisfaction?

What would be the cards?

The experiment that we could make: self-learning, training, dojo, open space with a team…

How to measure the appetite for change?

How to know where to act with the cards?

How the design of the board should evolve to be adjusted to the organization?

Interesting session. A lot of work to be done to be able to get to a result for a specific organization. And, yes, I added that in my Someday / Maybe column 🙂

OKRs! OK, What? Joseph Contreras, Scrum Master at Fidelity, proposed this Open Space session on the third day of Agile Games 2019.

Joseph invited the participants to contribute to a short presentation of what Objectives and Key Results (OKRs) are.

In a nutshell, Objectives are where we want to go, and Key Results tell us when we get there. Key Results are aspirational and not reaching 100% is not a problem.

I really liked the first example he used, and the invitation he made to the participant to challenge the formulation.

The example was:

Objective: I want to be healthy

Key Result: I eat less sugar

We challenged the Objective by pushing to have it stated the destination. Something like: I am healthy.

We challenged the Key Result by saying that eating less sugar is an activity. Yes, it is a healthy one because as human beings we store the excess sugar as fat. So maybe the Key Results should be a measure of the proportion of fat in our body.

Joseph then shared is own personal OKRs, and invited us the same way to challenge them. He told us that the previous version of his OKRs where really bad, and that we can expect to fail the first time, and improve the next one. I think it gave freedom to people in the room to challenge that second version.

The result was a great social learning experience. It was the perfect way to have all the participants think about measuring the impact of activities, and not the activities themselves.

The participants were able to build upon what the others just said and proposed better objectives and better key results in just a few minutes.

With an Open Space, all attendees are active participants. They define the program and choose which sessions to contribute. They also have the freedom to leave a session when they think they are not learning or contributing. This is known as “The law of 2 feet” or “The law of mobility.”

I chose to propose two sessions for the Open Space:

One with Isabel Monville, to play a game with the participants: Kanjis. This one went great and I will come back to that session in a future post.

I picked the first time available, and so it was one of the first sessions of the day. When you attend an open space, and especially for the first time, you are confronted to a last minute choice of your first session. At the same time, you just heard about the law of two feet, and the roles of bees and butterfly.

A bee is a person that goes from breakout session to breakout session, maybe collaborating with some groups and cross-fertilizing ideas that come from another group.

A butterfly is a person that does not take part in any breakout at the moment to fulfill her own needs. Sometimes butterflies cluster in impromptu sessions and make groundbreaking insights.

You can choose not to attend any session and be a bee or a butterfly whenever you want. The freedom of choice brings some people to select late and to switch room frenetically hoping to find the best possible spot. All people also need to discover the space. After one session, it seems that everybody adjusts, and the last minute’s changes at the beginning of the next sessions are less disruptive.

I chose a small room with a triangle-shaped table so we could have a good conversation.

I started 2 or 3 minutes after 10. And just after I started people entered the room, and left the room for the next 5 minutes. Each time they tried to open the door they were pulling the handle instead of pushing. A bad design choice, if the door needs to be pushed, it should be a plate, not a vertical handle that suggests the door should be pulled.

Do you see what is going on there? I blame the circumstances. I try to justify what happens. If I continue down that path, I will learn nothing. A quick look at the Responsibility Process can help in that situation. It works this way:

Responsibility Owning your ability and power to create, choose, and attract

Quit Giving up to avoid the pain of Shame and Obligation

Obligation Doing what you have to instead of what you want to

Shame Laying blame onto oneself (often felt as guilt)

Justify Using excuses for things being the way they are

Lay Blame Holding others at fault for causing something

Denial Ignoring the existence of something

What really happened?

I started my presentation, and two sentences after the start, I was confused and changed my initial plan, tried to mumble through all the chapters without giving any airtime to the participants.

I knew it was not going well. During the previous days, I had the opportunity to sit next to a person who was taking beautiful notes in her notebook. Before the beginning of the session, I nudge her to be our notetaker for the session. During the session, I had her notes in front of me reflecting the growing confusion in which all people in the room were probably.

Someone tried to save the session. She found her way to interrupt me and the notetaker, asked questions, and put the session on a better track. Thank you!

What did I want to say initially?

This book equips you to make a positive change in your organization starting from the one place you can guarantee success – you.

The book is structured in three parts: The Individual, The Team, and The Organization.

Each chapter turns insight into actions that you can use straight away to build momentum and create lasting change from yourself to your team, from your team to other teams, and from other teams to the entire organization.

If you’re looking to make a change in your organization but don’t know where to begin, worried that nobody will listen to you, or fear you’ll burn bridges along the way then Changing Your Team From The Inside will give you a plan, increase your influence, and help you build high impact, sustainable relationships in the process.

This book has everything you need to build high impact, sustainable teams.

Jim Kwik said:

If an egg is broken by outside force, life ends. If broken by inside force, life begins. Great things always begin from inside.

I shared this belief that great things always begin from inside.

After that introduction, my goal was to open the floor to questions and facilitate the conversation from there, bringing more details of what you can find in each part of the book.

It seems that I was not ready to say just that. And as I was not prepared enough to deliver the message. I failed to deliver it.

Interestingly, even if I knew that it was not going well, I was not able to stop myself and ask to start over.